Lindsay Lohan opens up about drug use in interview

Troubled actress Lindsay Lohan has revealed her 2007 DUI arrest came after she first tried drugs at a party in Los Angeles.

The “Mean Girls” star, who checked into the Betty Ford Clinic in California to start a court-ordered 90-day stint on Friday, opened up about her drug use and well-documented family strife in her most candid interview with British newsman Piers Morgan for The Daily Mail.

In the chat that took place weeks before her latest rehab stint, Lohan tells Morgan she was a hard-working, clean-living teen until friends introduced her to alcohol when she was 17 and she really started going off the rails after her first experience with drugs.

She explains, “I got arrested for my first DUI when I was 20 and they found me with drugs and, from then on, the press were on me all the time. It was the first time I’d taken drugs; I was out in a club with people I shouldn’t have been with, and took cocaine, and got in the car. It was so stupid.”

But she insists she isn’t the coke fiend many believe her to be, stating, “Everyone thinks I’ve done it so many times. But I’ve only done it maybe four or five times in my life… I don’t like it. It reminds me of my dad. I took it four times in a period from about the age of 20 to 23, and I got caught twice… I felt a little too buzzed. It made me feel uncomfortable.

“I’ve never taken heroin either, never injected myself with anything, never done LSD. Those things all scare me.”

But she admits to experimenting with marijuana and ecstasy, adding, “I liked that (ecstasy) better than the others. I didn’t drink on it, so I was just chilling. It’s something that a lot of people experience when they’re in college. I just should have known that being in the public eye, someone was bound to say something or try to make some money off it.”

In the candid chat, Lohan also opens up about her relationship with her now-estranged father Michael, claiming his alleged cocaine binges in her youth used to leave her younger siblings terrified.

She adds, “I was never afraid of him, but my younger siblings were terrified. My first instinct was to always make sure they and my mom were OK.”

And she reveals that every attempt she has made to reconcile with her father in recent years has ended badly: “He won’t change. I just think there comes a point where you just kind of have to accept what it is. Whenever I do try to bring him back into my life, he creates chaos for me and uses it to his advantage.”